


imagine me and you

by threadoflife



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Alternate Universe - Imagine Me & You Fusion, Angst with a Happy Ending, Comics/Movie Crossover, Crossover, F/F, F/M, Female John Watson, Female Sherlock Holmes, Female Sherlock Holmes/Female John Watson, Femjohn is still John Watson, Femlock, Genderbending, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Inspired by Imagine Me & You (2005), John is a danger addict, Mary is Mark, femjohnlock
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-13
Updated: 2017-02-13
Packaged: 2018-09-24 03:13:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,415
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9697175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/threadoflife/pseuds/threadoflife
Summary: After returning from Afghanistan, John feels hollow and depressed. With little interest in life, she meets Mark, who ends up saving her. With little else to do--because nothing happens to her--she eventually agrees as Mark proposes to her.When she happens upon Mike Stamford, he recommends her a florist on Baker St. by the name of Sherlock Holmes for her wedding.Turns out, somethingdoeshappen to John.





	

**Author's Note:**

> idefk ok
> 
> very much inspired by the beautiful movie "imagine me and you" and that adorable fanart of florist!femlock:
> 
> http://wssh-watson.tumblr.com/post/157164756277/wssh-watson-vilonal-florist-au-for-femlock
> 
> see the link for a rough version of this--what set this off in the first place.
> 
> my first actual fic that is written on a computer, not on my phone HAHAHAH. i'm putting up the first chapter because the library closes soon and i have no other option of getting to a keyboard this week and i wouldn't be able to stand waiting a week to post this so here goes
> 
> and, well, also my first actual fic in a long while, with, um, an attempt at plot.
> 
> if you want to talk to me about this or see me yell about it follow me on tumblr: wssh-watson.tumblr.com :>

John is awake long before the alarm on her phone has the chance to blare.

The obnoxious _beep beep beep beep_ reaches through the walls. Admittedly, the walls of John’s current home are particularly thin, but John is sure if she actually had the financial means of living in a terraced house, she’d still hear it the second it went off over the distance of a storey.

Toothbrush in mouth, she closes her eyes, fingers tightening around the rim of the basin. A deep breath through her nose later, and she finishes her morning routine in the bathroom. The cane thumps heavier than probably necessary on the floor as she limps towards the bed in the corner. She reaches down and shuts off the alarm with a twinge of satisfaction. The beeping dies down, and for once, John welcomes the silence.

She doesn’t welcome the dread. It’s no different, this morning.

It’s the damn alarm; it haunts her. Every single morning, John cannot escape it: her alarm going off is the only sound of life in the dismal bedsit, and it pronounces the silence that usually lies over John’s ‘flat’ all the more.

As if having to stare at herself in the mirror every morning isn’t enough of a reminder of the failure her life has turned into.

John’s heavy breathing breaks the ringing silence. She inhales and exhales in the familiar rhythm with her head bowed down staring at the floor until she has herself under control, until the edges of her vision, tinted dark and slightly distorted, stabilise somewhat.

Breathing significantly lighter, she straightens. In her chest, the dread remains—a tight knot like a metal fist that no amount of mental arm wrestling can shake off or dissolve.

She isn’t yet done with her morning routine.

With one turn and four steps, she’s in front of the desk. Ignoring her laptop and the cooling coffee on top of it, she pulls open the drawer.

Reality recedes in slow, seductive increments. John’s breathing eases further; inside her chest, the knot loosens to a bearable degree; on the knob of her drawer, her hand steadies completely. The tremor disappears.

In the drawer, her gun gleams dully.

She stares down at it like a woman obsessed.

When she thinks, minutes later, _Yes, I can get through today_ , she slides the drawer shut.

*

London is still London.

When John walks towards the tube at seven in the morning, London is still London. It’s one of the things she’s more grateful for. She thought it would feel stifling; she expected the oxygen of London to be swapped with chlorine or cyanide, making her incapable of living here again, stripped of her defences as she is. Instead there’s just the sense of wearing the wrong clothes every single day, clothes that sit wrongly and make her want to squirm about.

Well. That, and the crushing boredom, the feeling of oppressive uselessness, and the suffocating depression, that is.

Other than that, John’s fine.

She welcomes London’s fast, dirty, and loud side of seven in the morning when the myriad of people all rush towards different places like mindless sheep. Being shoved at in the street despite walking with a cane is still more pleasant than sitting alone in her still, quiet bedsit at seven in the evening staring at the walls.

She’s just another sheep, these days, limping towards the surgery where Sarah Sawyer took pity on her and offered her some locum work. It’s her second week. It’s scuttling through the day until it’s time to go back home. It’s something to do.

It’s awful.

A temporary five to nine in exchange for a war field. From army doctor to locum work. Splendid.

Sarah welcomes her as cheerfully as she did the last week. “Hi, John,” she says, peering up from her desk. “Good morning!”

“Yeah.” John clears her throat. “Good morning.”

Feeling hateful, anger and self-loathing bubbling in her gut, John smiles at Sarah. It’s her thin, flat smile.

Every morning, Sarah smiles back brightly, none the wiser.

*

December passes in icy, windy dullness.

John goes to work, and in the fourth week, she actually makes an effort at having breakfast in the morning. She manages an apple on the first day, a cereal bar on the second, and on the third day, she ends up staring twice as long as usual at the gun in her drawer in an attempt to evade the suffocating regularity of yet another imposed task she cares nothing for. She can go through with work, because it keeps her in London. She can’t find it in herself to have breakfast.

Not yet, she tells herself. Not yet. She’s making an effort.

Ella, her therapist, is one such effort.

“So how’s your blog going?” she asks in the next session. “Making any progress?”

 _I have a job_ , John thinks but doesn’t say out loud. _How’s that for progress?_

She gazes wordlessly back at Ella. This continues for a minute, then Ella sighs.

“John.” She leans forward. “You…”

Hysterically, John wonders if this is the part where Ella tells her again to write about anything that happens to her, which is supposed to “honestly help” her. Ella had been unimpressed when John had written, ‘Nothing,’ and a day later, to clarify: ‘Nothing happens to me.’

If Ella knew John only comes to see her because otherwise she wouldn’t shut the drawer again, Ella wouldn’t be pleased. But Ella doesn’t know, and she still isn’t pleased with John. Oh, she writes, ‘(ʎɹɐɹodɯǝʇ) qoɾ ʍǝu :ssǝɹƃoɹd,’ but she doesn’t seem to take kindly to mutinous patients. Makes one wonder why she comes recommended as therapist for veterans, John thinks bitterly.

She tunes back in just in time for Ella to finish speaking. She hasn’t heard a word.

“Er. Sorry?”

Ella does not look too impressed.

*

That night, John sits stiffly at her desk and stares down at the | flashing on the white post format of her blog. Not a single word comes. The | keeps flashing, mockingly.

The longer she sits there, the more irritated John becomes until she can’t stand it anymore. Shoving back the chair and getting up, she kicks the table. It’s so forceful the vibrations of it make her wonky leg hurt even more, and she catches herself on the back of the chair just in time before she falls.

Fuck Ella. Fuck therapy. Fuck writing about nothing. _Fuck nothing._

If nothing happens to her, _she_ has to happen.

John pulls on her coat, slams the door shut behind her, and limps back out into the darkness of another cold London night. She looks up at the tube sign when she approaches the nearest station and takes a moment to hesitate. _Am I really doing this?_

The alternative is all too present: her bedsit, another dreadful, boring night, maybe a nightmare or two. And next week, Ella delivering another lecture on the necessity of discipline and making an effort in therapy.

John squares her jaw, gives a jerky nod to herself, and takes the tube.

She’s lived long enough in London to know it intimately—to know all the alleys and areas intimately, rather, in which it is dangerous for a woman to walk alone at night.

The thought appeals so incredibly it makes John feel light-headed. It’s the first thing that’s appealed to John at all, since she’s been back.

She gets into another tube, gets out, and spends a good twenty minutes walking. People begin to disperse, until the street is almost empty. The number of dilapidated, forgotten houses multiplies. The few functioning street lights she walks under flicker.

Danger licks up John’s spine in little, hot fiery lashes. Her blood rushes in her ears, but her hearing is attuned to the slightest noise.

It’s hard to walk with hunched shoulders, as if she’s scared, when it’s the safest and most confident she’s felt since her return, walking this forlorn, dark street. The thought of seeming more vulnerable—more scared—more open to attack—makes it easier, though. She’s more inviting that way.

Her first suitor doesn’t take long showing up, with another one skulking in the background.

John allows herself three minutes of verbal foreplay—she has to keep from rolling her eyes and muttering, “Hurry up”—and then the man, a thickset, bearded idiot with frankly awful grammar, takes another step towards her and brings his palm around her elbow. As if he has every right to do that.

His breath fans into John’s face, warm and repelling. John takes another few seconds and pulls out her favourite trick: letting her eyes sweep up and down the man’s body, once, in a lingering gaze. What she communicates is _let me see if I like you. Oh, yes, you might do._

What she’s doing is picking out all his weak places.

Predictably, the man’s mouth pulls into a smirk. His hand around her elbow tightens. He moves closer.

The next second, John has said, “No,” and shoved him back. He stumbles, cursing. In the background, his crony is watching and going still.

 _Oh, yes. Oh, God, yes,_ John thinks.

She licks her lips, and then it begins.

Ten thrilling minutes of wait—instinct— _react_ later, she has them on their knees. By the end of it, John’s breathing is just a bit laboured, and she’s standing tall and proud, grinning down at the two men on the kerb. She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, and the sight of her blood smeared there makes her give a high, short giggle. She feels hysterical. She feels alive.

And she thinks nothing of the fact that she’s standing on two legs without the help of her cane.

She bends down to pick it up, says, “That’s just a sprain or two, stop whingeing,” and turns around.

The ride back home, she grins out the window and feels the rawness of her knuckles with her fingers out until the feeling is gone.

*

The next day dawns as inevitable and stale as the one before.

Except with one difference: this time John doesn’t hear the repetitive _beep beep beep_ of her alarm from the bathroom; she hears it right beside her head, having slept in.

She grimaces and burrows her head further into the pillow, but it’s no use. The alarm is so penetrating that she forces herself up on her elbows and shuts it off right away. Blinking into the darkness of her room, she feels disoriented. Her eyes feel swollen, her head stuffed with cotton, and her vision consists of patches of different shades of brown and black all blurring together. She stays like that, propped up on her elbows and squinting into the room until she can recognise the outline of the door.

When she forces herself up, her entire body hurts. She stretches with a satisfied hum, relishing the slight burn of her muscles. Her jumper rides up, and she scratches her belly for a moment, thinking lazily about the fact that this was the first night of undisturbed sleep she’s had in months. She doesn’t feel rested at all and more like she’s been steamrollered, but hey, sleep without nightmares is sleep without nightmares.

Hungry for once, she gets herself a sandwich she devours on the tube. Her first breakfast in a while. _Should type that up on my blog_ , she thinks wryly. _“Breakfast.” So Ella and I can talk about egg mayo sandwiches next time._

She’s still giggling over the ridiculousness of the idea when she pushes the door to the surgery open.

“Hi, John,” Sarah pipes up as John enters the room. “Did you sleep—”

The moment she looks up and sees John’s face, she falls silent.

“Morning, Sarah,” John says easily, giving Sarah a bright smile that is much too bright for eight in the morning, but John feels… okay-ish, this morning, she supposes. “You okay?”

After another couple seconds of staring, Sarah says, “Yeah, actually, I am.” She adds, a bit haltingly, “You… as well?”

“I’m fine,” John says, and it doesn’t feel like a lie, for once. Not all the way, anyway. “So what do we have today?”

The smile on Sarah’s face is genuine, and for the first time since she’s been favoured with it every morning, John feels a twinge of disappointment. Sarah is terribly kind and terribly pretty, especially when she blushes; she’s also terribly heterosexual.

John decides to consider the effects of self-righteous violence on her libido another time.

Work lays all of yesterday’s efforts to waste, again. It’s tedious, and slow, and John feels the energy seep out of her the longer she has to stay. Depression is like an old friend, draping herself around her shoulders in deceptive comfort: a heavy friend, weighing her down.

When John leaves for the day, the prospect of returning to her dingy flat is too much. Even though she doesn’t really have the money for it, she gets a coffee anyway, feeling reckless and beyond disinterested in her finances. She walks London a while until she’s in Russel Square Park, and her leg starts acting up again. She scowls down at it. How to walk now? The coffee in her other hand makes that a bit more difficult, and—

“John! John Watson!”

—that’s her name. Someone’s calling her: a man. Stopping abruptly, she jerks around, lifting her chin, and—

She collides with a man.

The coffee goes flying to the ground in the same moment as her cane, and John curses under her breath. When the man has to catch her—holding her by her shoulders—she gives her cursing voice. If there’s one thing she cannot stand, it’s having to helped by a man.

“Fucking Christ,” she snaps, shaking her arms out to get his hands off her. “Are you blind?”

The man has the advantage of height—he’s just got a head on her, though; it could be worse—and broader shoulders, but John glares up at him anyway.

“No, not blind,” the man says after a moment. “At least not blind enough to not see how pretty you are.”

Wow. _Way_ out of context. John raises her eyebrows, exceedingly unimpressed. “Sorry?” she says, with a disbelieving shake of her head. “I don’t think that’s what you meant to say.”

John’s irritability seems to shake him out of it. He blinks and bends to pick up John’s cane. Handing it to her, he begins smiling for some reason. “No, it wasn’t,” he says. “Sorry. Yeah, actually— _that_ was what I meant to say, right? Sorry for knocking you over. Didn’t pay attention.”

“I could see that,” John mutters, righting herself on her cane. Ignoring him, she peers around his shoulder to see if she can see the person who called her, but in just that moment, the man shifts with her, effectively blocking her view.

“Look, mate, could you,” she starts, taking a step back and attempting to peer over the other shoulder.

The man doesn’t seem to be able to take a hint.

“Close guess, but it’s not mate. It’s _Mark_.” The smile becomes a rueful grin. “And I really am sorry. Can I make it up to you?”

Behind him, the park is virtually empty. There’s no one there.

Huh.

Frowning, John pulls back and blinks up at the man—at Mark. “What do you mean?”

“A coffee,” Mark says promptly. “I’m responsible for making you lose yours, right? I should really get you a new one.”

Well. Those are probably the first words of wisdom she’s heard today. And he is right: if it weren’t for him barrelling into her, her coffee would still be in her hand, and she’d probably have had the company of someone who seems to have known her.

Her eyes dart up and down Mark, once. He’s slim but visibly muscled, and he’s got a boyish, impish grin, and alert blue eyes. His short blond hair is windswept, handsome. Even the glaring red jacket he’s wearing doesn’t detract from the overall rather conventional sort of attractiveness.

John is grumpy and bad-tempered, and she doesn’t like the way Mark can’t take a hint. But John also doesn’t want to spend another night alone waiting for a nightmare that is sure to come—the dread being ever present—and sometimes, persistence can be a good thing. In the right person.

She scrutinises Mark a last time, and when she finally shrugs her shoulders, it’s more out of dread than actual enthusiasm.

*

The date, nice enough but uneventful, ends with his number in her phone.

She comes home at about nine that night and takes a shower right away. The day was long, and she feels as if there’s some residue of her depression left in the corners of her mouth, a blankness that envelopes her skin, making her feel detached from her own body. She supposes she should feel different after a halfway successful date, but she turns the shower to scalding, glad to feel her shoulders and back burn with the heat. It overshadows the blankness.

When she’s done, she feels a little better. She straightens her shoulders before the mirror and looks critically at the rings underneath her eyes and her small mouth and thin lips. When she bends forward with her palms on the counter, her breasts are heavy and loose. On her shoulder, her scar is a mess.

The picture of misery is completed by the handle of her cane showing in the corner of the mirror.

 _Someone wants you_ , she thinks blandly. _Someone’s seen you limping today and in a bad temper, and someone wants you._

It’s supposed to be an encouraging thought: you’re damaged, and still someone wants you. It isn’t encouraging. All that does is leave her with hateful wet eyes and a foulness in her mouth.

 _It would be encouraging_ , John thinks, sighing, rubbing furiously at her eyes, _if it were the right person_.

Probably.

After, she sits down at the table and powers up the laptop.

The | is back, flashing maniacally—more rapidly than usual, it seems to John. She watches its urgency listlessly and does not begin to write. _I know the feeling. Waiting around for someone or something to pick you up and continue you, and nothing comes. There’s just blankness._

As soon as the melancholy thought registers, she gives an annoyed grunt, shoves the laptop back, and buries her head in her arms. Her head is a battlefield of conflicting thoughts:

 _You should write it down. Ella would approve. Something happened to you today._ Doesn’t feel like it. Anyway, how desperate am I to write about a first date? _You are plenty desperate. Look at you: alone in a bedsit, moping about with nothing to do._

_You should be glad someone wants you at all, the way you are._

The thought is sobering, even as it makes her breath hitch. She draws herself up, sets her fingers on the keyboard and wills herself to write. Write something. Anything. ‘I met someone today.’ ‘I was on a date.’ ‘I participated in social interaction outside of work today.’ ‘An idiot ran me over.’

Going through the different phrasings, her hackles go up, and pride, long-forgotten, surges up in her. _Since when_ , she thinks defiantly, _have I become a woman swooning about having met someone?_

Even if she hardly feels like swooning, she refuses to write about such a mundanity. When she shoves the laptop away this time, it is with vindication.

Like her good mood this morning, the vindication dwindles to a small flicker that soon dies. John lies in bed that night like every other night before, devoid of any interest, energy, or positive thought.

Despite herself, she grabs her phone, navigates to ‘contacts.’ She stares at Mark’s number and considers deleting it. She considers this for long moments. When the screen goes dark, she taps at it and repeats the process.

 _Look at you_ , the thought comes, unbidden and intrusive as always. _What have you got to lose? This might well be the only person arguably interested in you in any way._

_Look at you, sad and ruined and lonely. So lonely. What have you got to lose?_

On the top corner of the phone screen, the date changes: 29/01 to 30/01. John watches the last day pass by, vacantly.

She keeps the number.

What does she have to lose?

Nothing: nothing to happens to her.


End file.
